


A Modest Ventilation

by Omnicat



Series: Two Modest Ventilations [1]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: (Except David Rittenhouse), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Christmas Isn't Canon, Crack and Feels and Behind-the-Scenes Sarcasm, Everybody Lives/Nobody Dies, Explosions, Fix-It, Gen, Happy Ending, Men Crying, Reunions, Season 1 Episode 11 Is Only Still Canon Because Flynn Needing Time To Cool Down, Season 1 Episodes 12 through 16 Aren't Canon, Season 2 Isn't Canon, Toys 'R Us, Was The Only Reasonable Part Of The Season 1 Episode 10 Fallout, drones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:42:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26981590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omnicat/pseuds/Omnicat
Summary: Flynn gives eliminating Rittenhouse at its eponymous source exactly one and a half tries and then gives up. David Rittenhouse’s house is guarded now, after all. Nothing they can do about him and his anymore. Better start blowing things up at random again. /s
Relationships: Flynn & Anthony, Lorena/Flynn
Series: Two Modest Ventilations [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1991470
Comments: 8
Kudos: 14





	A Modest Ventilation

**Author's Note:**

> I just really needed to get this out of my system. Every time I try to write a canon-divergence AU, I get stuck on this bleeping episode and _Timeless's_ baffling decision to proceed for another season and a half like it never actually happened. Maybe now I no longer will!

Two days after his ill-conceived kidnapping of Lucy ended (he was man enough to admit to himself he’d been throwing a tantrum and so that move never would’ve resulted in anything other than what it did), Flynn awoke with a start, stared wide-eyed at the vaulted church ceiling, and swore in five languages. He overturned his cot in his hurry to get out of bed and hopped around the Mothership on one foot as he simultaneously tried to put on his shoes.

"Anthony!" he yelled.

Anthony jolted out of his own cot in fright, croaking, "Don’t shoot me, shoot Flynn, he’s over there!"

Grinning wildly, Flynn grabbed his shoulders and hoisted him upright. "Later, man, later. I was such an idiot, but I’ve got it now! Ready the Mothership. I’ll be back in half an hour."

He sprinted off, jumped in the getaway car, and tore out of the abandoned church parking lot. Twenty minutes later, he returned with a large Toys "R" Us bag. He grabbed a duffel full of explosives and detonator parts, a box of batteries, and a couple of costumes, just in case, and hopped into the time machine. After double-checking that the hard drive holding his research was on board, he strapped in.

Voice hoarse with repressed nerves and excitement, he told Anthony the destination. Once there, he prepped the toy drone he’d bought and had it latch onto an armed block of plastic explosive with its grabbers.

"What’s that for?" Anthony asked apprehensively.

Flynn tapped the view screen on the controller. "Just watch."

He sat in the Mothership’s open hatch and, with Anthony leaning over his shoulder, steered the drone over a ridge of trees and beyond, guided by the built-in camera. The house soon came into view (short-range transmitters required no satellites or other outside technology to function, but he _had_ given coordinates that took the shortness of that range into consideration), and he started circling it languidly. Searching. Waiting.

Soon enough, a servant woman looked up, dropped her basket of vegetables to cross herself, and hurried into the house, screaming so loudly they could hear it in the Mothership. A commotion ensued, servants huddling in every window. But ultimately, only one figure emerged from the house to study the strange flying thing.

"Is that..." Anthony gasped.

"Mister Rittenhouse himself, aged twenty-one," Flynn said, more cheerful than he’d felt for years. "At this age, not yet anything but another rich, snotnosed son of some other important man. No real influence of his own or important friends yet, and no unified philosophy to elevate his rotten personality and life goals to a cult-like ideal. Due to become the father of his first unacknowledged bastard in about six months, by the way. Though of course, that’s not how the child’s descendants told the story to their esteemed fellow cult members later. They passed themselves off as John’s offspring, since as far as I can tell he actually was never heard from again, even by allies. But the birth certificate makes it very clear they were illegitimate George’s. Anyway: meet our good friend Lucy’s most despicable ancestor. On her mother’s side, surprisingly."

Anthony gave him a funny look. "You had time to uncover all that since the World’s Fair trip?"

"Didn’t take as long as you might think. I’ve gotten very good at genealogical research since I traced mine and Lorena’s family trees. I’ll have to know where to go if I accidentally erase one or both of us and prevent Iris from being born, after all," Flynn said distractedly.

(Now _there_ was an obstacle that could have stopped Flynn in his tracks: the threat of having to pay for Rittenhouse’s defeat with Lorena and Iris’s lives. That fear was always on his mind and the weakness it created in him was unacceptable, so precautions had been in order.)

He lowered the drone to the entranced young man in his camera’s sights. David stepped closer as the toy approached and even held out a hand, palm up, as if to let a dog sniff it.

Flynn dropped the plastic explosive into it.

Young Rittenhouse crowed in delight and studied the ‘gift’ he’d been given as the drone rose high up into the air above him.

Flynn held up the remote detonator for Anthony to see, and the two men shared a look. Flynn couldn’t stop grinning.

"Listen, I know how you think of me, and I don’t even blame you. But I’ve _never_ taken joy in killing another living creature. Ever. Today will be the first and last time in my life I’ll do this with a smile on my face."

"Well what are you waiting for, then?!" Anthony hissed. Coping poorly with the ‘waiting for Flynn to do his thing’ part of the mission until the end. Then he paled. "No, no, wait – please tell me you traced my and my wife’s family trees too."

"Of course I did," Flynn assured him, and thumped him on the back. "I got everybody important. If there was ever any chance they’d _notice_ when history changed, I have ’em. Rufus, Jiya, Mason. All our friends."

"They’re not _your_ friends, they fucking hate you," Anthony giggled hysterically.

Flynn laughed like a madman himself. "Like that’s ever stopped me before!"

He turned his eyes back to the view screen and flicked the switch.

David Rittenhouse went _splat_.

It was fucking beautiful.

The distant explosion was like music to Flynn and Anthony’s ears. Eyes scrunched shut and face aching with the size of his grin, Flynn pumped his fists in the air and let himself fall backwards through the hatch. Sobbing with joy and relief, Anthony threw himself after him and wrapped his arms around Flynn’s neck.

Team Lifeboat found them like that a little bit later: drunk on joy, rolling and jumping and screaming in triumph. Predictably, they were very, very upset with Team Mothership. Slightly more surprisingly, Flynn lifting Lucy off the ground in a twirling, rib-cracking hug and Anthony glomming onto Rufus and Wyatt at the same time and tackling all three of them to the ground in the process proved an effective distraction and de-escalation technique. Maybe they recognized the futility of fighting each other any longer. Maybe it was shell shock, pure and simple.

Either way, Flynn gave them his number and explained about the family trees saved to his hard drive, in case they came back to the present and found anybody they cared about missing. Then he dragged Anthony back into the Mothership before their stunned cease-fire could shatter.

Back home, he dialed his own landline. His heart practically climbed out of his throat as the phone rang. And rang. And rang.

His call went to answering machine.

 _‘You’ve reached Garcia, Lorena, and Iris Flynn,’_ Lorena’s dear voice, as familiar to him as his own, said pleasantly, and he could have sworn his heart stopped beating. _‘We can’t come to the phone right now, but leave a message after the beep and we’ll –’_

The recorded message cut off, and Lorena’s voice filled his ears in a very different way, breathless and harried.

"Garcia, is that you?!"

Flynn felt his eyes fill with tears. He slid down the rusty wall of the abandoned bunker they’d jumped to, and couldn’t help but laugh wetly. "Who else would I be?"

"Oh, thank god. What the hell just happened? You just disappeared into thin air!"

Even when you arrived back in the present to a timeline where the local you _hadn’t_ left via time-travel, Anthony had explained to Flynn once, that other version of you would stop existing the moment you touched down. Nobody at Mason Industries had ever seen it happen with their own eyes, but they’d pieced together the fact that it happened because sometimes random butterfly effects caused the pilot/jump roster to change. Once he got off the phone with his own wife, Anthony would probably want to interview Lorena about witnessing that moment firsthand.

It had been so long since Flynn had dared to _really_ hope he would ever find a timeline where he’d had no reason to disappear in a time machine.

He cleared his throat. Twice. "Is Iris there?"

"Of course not, you dropped her off at soccer practice. Are you okay? Where are you?"

"I’m –" His voice broke, and he squeaked out: "– fine. But I don’t think I should be driving right now. Can you come get me?"

"Yes, yes, of course. Where are you?"

He haltingly gave her directions. They switched the call to her cell phone, and didn’t break the connection for the full half hour it took her to get there. He wept the entire time.

He wept even harder once she arrived. And he laughed with every ounce of breath he had left after all the sobbing, and hugged her like he’d never hugged before.

Lucy and co called him, eventually, but not because they needed him and Anthony to help them squeeze their family trees back into shape. Fate seemed to have thought better of its Final Destination ways just this once, and brought all of them all the loved ones they wanted to save without any fuss. If people were going to keep trying to push ideas about predestination on him anyway, Flynn decided, he was going to believe that this was how it had been meant to end all along, and the long-awaited one-jump solution to all their problems was their reward for finally getting it right.

They had to decide what to do with the ships, though, and that was best done together.

Time machines did not go ‘splat’ when you dropped a bunch of C4 on them with a toy drone, but the resulting _boom_ was just as satisfying.

(Flynn tried to leave Lorena and Iris ‘for their own good’, he really did. But that never quite ended up happening. Not between the joyride through Vegas in the sixties Lucy took her on while Flynn, Wyatt, Anthony and Rufus put the Mothership’s nuclear core back where they’d taken it from, and the fact that, unlike the one he’d imagined during his many cold, lonely nights of grief and guilt and self-loathing, _this_ Lorena could talk back to him when he started laying out all the reasons why he was a horrible person who never deserved to be happy again and she and Iris angels who ought not to be sullied by his presence. He was an idiot, but he was _her_ idiot. End of story.

Of course, in this new timeline Flynn had never stolen a time machine, let alone a nuclear battery to upgrade it. Meaning they actually just ended up dumping an _extra_ core in sixties’ Vegas. When they came back to the very last version of the present, they found that speculation and conspiracy theories about the mysterious multiplying nukes of Atomic City were up there with Area 51 in popularity. Lorena convinced Garcia to let her hang a copy of one particularly funny, openly baffled article from an old newspaper in a nice frame on their wall, as a souvenir.)


End file.
